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The Fastest-Growing Jobs of the Next Decade

Are you a student on your way to campus, unsure of what to choose as a major? Are you looking for a better job? Well, you're hardly alone. With over 7% of the American workforce unemployed, you're bound to have competition wherever you look -- but with the right planning, you might be able to hitch your wagon to one of America's hottest jobs. Let's take a look at where the jobs will be by 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment projections:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It's a rather uneven batch of opportunities -- several of these fields are rather low-paying, but then you've got health care and education, which can offer excellent job security if you find the right opportunity. Let's drill down a little bit to see what the salary ranges look like for these fields:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For comparison purposes, the poverty level for a family of four in the United States is $23,550 -- $11,490 if you're working for yourself. If you want to get ahead in life, the fastest-growing foodservice jobs are probably not good ideas, and neither are many of the lowest-paying jobs on the list. Let's run through all the higher-paying jobs, from $30,000 per year on up, and break down just how many new jobs each particular profession is expected to gain in the next seven years or so:

Profession

2010 Employment

Projected New Jobs (2020)

Growth Rate

Median Salary (2010)

Physicians / Surgeons

691,000

168,300

24.4%

$111,570

Registered Nurses

2,737,400

711,900

26%

$64,690

Accountants / Auditors

1,216,900

190,700

15.7%

$61,690

Wholesale and Manufacturing Sales Representatives

1,430,000

223,400

15.6%

$52,440

Elementary School Teachers (not Special Education)

1,476,500

248,800

16.8%

$51,660

Office Supervisors

1,424,400

203,400

14.3%

$47,460

Postsecondary Teachers

1,756,000

305,700

17.4%

$45,690

Licensed Practical and Vocational Nurses

752,300

168,500

22.4%

$40,380

Carpenters

1,001,700

196,000

19.6%

$39,530

Heavy Truck Drivers

1,604,800

330,100

20.6%

$37,770

Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks

1,898,300

259,000

13.6%

$34,030

Medical Secretaries

508,700

210,200

41.3%

$30,530

Customer Service Representatives

2,187,300

338,400

15.5%

$30,460

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Interested in keeping others healthy? You've got nearly 1.3 million potential high-paying jobs to compete for by 2020, most of which are in the nursing field. If you like crunching numbers, you'll have over 400,000 new opportunities to earn a living doing that by 2020. There'll be over half a million new teaching jobs, too, if these projections are accurate.

If you're looking to invest in the growth of health care employment, here are several of the largest publicly traded hospital companies, including revenues, profit margins, and P/E ratios. All are sure to hire briskly to keep up with the aging population of America, and that means more income -- at least in theory, anyway.

However, before you jump right into these hot career paths (or investments), consider this for a moment:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Even the best-laid plans and projections can go astray. In the case of these projections from roughly a decade ago, such plans can go astray in the direction of several million fewer employees. Will health care and education be the next big mistakes on the BLS' ledger? We'll have to find out in a few years.

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Fool contributor Alex Planes holds no financial position in any company mentioned here. Add him on Google+ or follow him on Twitter @TMFBiggles for more insight into markets, history, and technology.

Comments from our Foolish Readers

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This writer assumes nothing. This writer is simply reporting on projections published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These are the jobs that BLS expects will have the largest increase in total employment by 2020.

i work in transportation in texas. the rail and truck corridor from k.c.mo. to laredo is booming. many rail jobs and trucking jobs. and people doing freelance work too. if you want to really work and not lay off with 'hangnail' every other day then come to texas.

What we need to see is more manufacturing jobs paying $40k a year, but college graduates don't want to work in a factory, and companies don't want to train high school graduates.

Please keep in mind in 1941 the average public high school only went thru the eleventh grade, and in 1943 America had factories full of 24 year old women building reliable high quality military aircraft by the thousands. Then in 1946 they built refrigerators.

Well around here were i live the job market is flooded with RN's there ever were and most just out of school and cant find a job!! And the ones that do dont get a lot of hours becouse there so many of them.. Sad

Shush Steve19776.... we can't tell people that health care is just another education bubble. We have to fill those nursing schools and issue those student loans.

As others have noted, the real suckers above are the doctors. You can't just look at their student loans, which will be huge, you also have to consider the 10 years of schooling which resulted in a whole decade of lost earning. The truck driver, on the other hand, can start their career right away after a shorting training course.

Sending report...

Alex Planes specializes in the deep analysis of tech, energy, and retail companies, with a particular focus on the ways new or proposed technologies can (and will) shape the future. He is also a dedicated student of financial and business history, often drawing on major events from the past to help readers better understand what's happening today and what might happen tomorrow.